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Hello and welcome to CHRONICLES OF COMICS! The weekly segment where I, the glorious and hansome Man Wit No Voice, delve into a comic of the past. Who’s past, you ask? Well, that of the comic industries.
This being my first week, I decided to do a special issue. Well, at least one special to me, DETECTIVE COMICS number twenty……..eight.

Since everyone has already read #27.
It’s always fascinating to me to peek into the realm of old Batman comics, something about seeing the Dark Knight;s roots is just interesting and very eye opening at the same time. In this story we learn a jewel robbery has just occurred in Gotham (note: the name of the city has yet to be said but we can assume its Gotham city) and the “Batman” is on the case. Its actually very interesting, within this first page we see that Batman wasn’t even trusted by Gordon fully yet. Bruce has to call up a man named Gumpy, who works for the police, disguising his voice to sound like Gordon to get even a little info of the crime. Gumpy tells Bruce that a man name Blake is behind the robberies and he is going to pull another job tonight. Bruce gets into his suit and heads for the apartment building where the robbery is supposed to take place. Now, readers of DETECTIVE COMICS #28 will get more then just a slight chuckle out of this scene.

Since it almost mirrors the “Batman’s” first fight scene in the issue, Batman intercepts two men on a roof and they fight, one dies by falling off the building and the other is left or the police. Difference is the ending of this scene, in the ending of this scene the police find the “Batman” after the fight and assume he is the thief, they start shooting and say they are going to tell the Commissioner who is really in charge of the robberies!
This is also a very cliché Batman thing of that era since apparently he knew that they were coming and wanted the police to think those exact thoughts. Batman’s ability to predict human actions to the finest detail appears in most of these old issues and is a driving point to the story.

Blake (the real big bad of this story) see’s the faulty news report and thinks it’ll be easier to have his boys rob places; which of course was Bruce’s plan all along. The Batman forces the criminals to tell him where Blake is and goes to the villains hide out. After that it’s pretty straight forward: Batman scares bad guy, Batman fights bad guy and Batman beats bad guy. A delicious recipe for success, if I ever saw one. This is an early Batman story so it is of course rough around the edges but I have to say I enjoyed this six page story. It shows Batman’s roots and how he has changed, but more importantly, how he has stayed the same. I love watching the Dark Knight work on missions before he had rules. These early stories show a murderous gun wielding psychopath who will do anything to prevail and thats whats so amazingly interesting, The Dark Knight we know now is still a psychopath but he has morals and can tell right from wrong but not this early rendition.

Bruce is also barely in these old issues, he either isn’t there at all or is just shown once sitting in a big chair on the phone, there is no Alfred and the city is not named. This world that will soon be built is just barely being flushed out but it doesn’t matter since the reader still felt a big connection and I think that’s why people connected to Bruce on such a level. It wasn’t the perfect story but it was a very fun story so it won’t get a perfect score.

6/10

Well there are more stories but I decided to only do the Batman story just in case I wish to come back to this issue someday.
Sorry for the short post but its my first installment so Its more of a taste.
This is Zane sometimes known as the Man With No Voice; tune in next week at Tuesday or Wednesday for the next installment.